Being influenced by Wilhelm von Schelling's ideas both directly and indirectly (through Feodor Dostoevsky), Mikhail Bakhtin's work can only be properly understood and appreciated when seen as developing Schelling's philosophy. Furthermore, it is argued that Schelling's work itself, attempting to overcome the opposition between idealism and realism, between spiritualism and materialism, should be seen as belonging to the tradition of process philosophy. Examining his work from this perspective, Bakhtin must be seen as far more than a literary theorist; he was a philosopher who succeeded through his defence of dialogism in developing a new 'processual' ethics which challenges traditional, more formalist ethical philosophies. At the same time, appreciating this strand of process thought overcomes the pernicious tendency to identify process philosophy with Alfred North Whitehead and his interpreters only, and reveals process philosophy to be a broader and richer tradition than has generally been acknowledged.